Twitter’s new ad unit to drive conversations with businesses

Aubrey Stenzel joined the Marcus Thomas public relations team in 2015. She has experience working with both B2B and CPG clients,... View full bio

On February 10, Twitter shared its quarterly earnings which showed the platform failed to grow its monthly active user count during the final three months of 2015. However, Twitter continues to combat its slow growth with advertising opportunities beneficial to brands. One of them being conversational ads.

On January 5, Twitter introduced conversational ads. According to Twitter, these ad forms make it even easier for consumers to engage with and spread a brand’s campaign message. The ad units will have a call-to-action button attached to the Promoted Tweet to encourage users to tweet with the brand using a customizable hashtag. When a user taps the call-to-action button within the ad unit, a prepopulated branded message and custom hashtag will open. Users can then edit and personalize the tweet before sending it out to their followers.

Conversational ads are currently in beta for select advertisers, but I had the opportunity to do a quick Q&A with Marcus Thomas’ Partner of Media and Connections Planning Raphael “Raf” Rivilla to get his thoughts.

Do you see conversational ads being a great tool for brands?

If used sparingly and if there is value in the brand dialogue, then it can be a great tool for creating conversations around the brand that then drive additional shares, comments and earned media. Lifetime’s use of conversational ads for their show “Pitch Slapped” made a lot of sense as it allowed the Twitter audience to vote on who won the battle. I can see this tool being used just to drive brand messaging and that can be a bad use of this new ad format

What do you see being the biggest hurdle brands will have to overcome if using conversational ads?

Control over the customizable message that results from the shared conversational ad. When a call-to-action button is tapped, the tweet composer opens with a pre-populated brand message accompanied by the creative and hashtag buttons. The consumer can then personalize the tweet and share it with their followers. This personalization is where the hurdle of brand control will happen.

Do you think certain brands and/or industries will benefit more than others when it comes to using conversational ads?

A lot of brands and industries can benefit from the data gleaned by the new ad format if there’s a true value proposition to the dialogue the ads can spur.